Manual Highlight Posts
There are benefits to manage your highlight posts manually.
First, automated widgets that display popular posts base on certain criteria and may not cover all your needs. For example, you may want to attract traffic to a post with lower pageviews that it doesn’t appear when using plugins.
Next, if you do it by hand and announce so, readers will appreciate your hard works and the intimate readership is enhanced.
Lastly, you control everything about the list.
Use Images for posts
One tip is to use images for posts to create visual clues instead of all text links.
Manual Related Posts
“Related Posts” plugin works well. However, it works by detecting similar posts by using keywords including tags. It is not intelligent enough to understand that some story should continue the article you’re writing.
For instance, you’d written an article about Management and never once mentioned Leadership. Then, you write about Leadership to prove the differences and the supplementing between Leadership and Management and want to link to the previous Management article. The plugin then only displays related Leadership articles after the new article, without knowing your preference. Manually doing so may improve the reading flow of your blog.
Tell your readers exactly what they should be doing
Click here
Compare these 2 paragraphs:
1. My summary of the Enneagram, for example, summarizes my knowledge after reading most celebrated books on the topic.
2. My summary of the Enneagram, for example, summarizes my knowledge after reading most celebrated books on the topic. Click here to read the summary.
What have you noticed? Which do you think is more of a temptation of clicking?
Statistics has that clear instruction such as “Click here” increases clicking rate by roughly 8%. Do give internet users explicit and specific commands.
“Related Posts” vs. a Selling statement
Compare these 2 invitations:
1. Related Posts
Principles of leadership
Leadership today
The theory of leadership
2. Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I’d written named The differences between Leadership and Management and how they supplement each other. It further explores the points covered in this post.
Since it’s an invitation, make it an invitation.
Date
Show-off the date of your post. This gives reader more hints on the context of the story so comprehending the article can be easier.
For example, some readers may be surprised to read your post that praises Sony Walkman as the state-of-the-art portable music player while Apple’s iPod was dominating in 2006. If the date “1/2/1990″ is included in the post, such confusion is avoidable.
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Interested in this topic? You might enjoy other WordPress publishing tips. Click here to read the previous article.
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Tags of this article: date,How to better Wordpress writing,linking,plugin,readership,writing.
Last update October 12, 2007
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September 4th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
[...] Click here to read the next 4 tips in the series. [...]